Hawk Roosting

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Hawk Roosting

Ted Hughes 1960

“Hawk Roosting” is from Ted Hughes’s second book, Lupercal, published in 1960. It is one of the earliest poems in which Hughes used animals to imply the nature of man and to spark thought about just how much of man’s behavior is instinctual, as opposed to how much of man is ruled by his divine, or God-like, side. The hawk, who is the first-person speaker of this poem, speaks entirely of instinctual actions, giving examples of actions that are natural to hawks but repugnant to creatures of conscience: “my manners are tearing off heads,” he says, and “the one path of my flight is direct / Through the bones of the living.” The stark lack of emotion in this voice, along with the intelligence of the word choices and the pride the hawk feels for itself, have led some readers to believe that the author’s intention in writing this poem was to glorify violence, or at least to make violent behavior acceptable. Hughes answered this charge directly in a 1971 interview. “Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It’s not so simple because maybe Nature is no longer so simple.” Whether or not the poem expresses approval of the behavior that its speaker describes is debatable; a strong argument may be presented for each viewpoint.

Author Biography

On August 17, 1930, Hughes was born in Mytholomroyd, a town located in the West Riding

district of Yorkshire; he was the third child of William Henry and Edith Farrar Hughes. Mytholomroyd is situated in a valley deep within the Pennine Mountains beneath a large cliff, and later in his life Hughes depicted the scene in his writings and related his experiences exploring the surrounding moors and hunting small game with his brother. When Hughes was seven years old, his family moved to Mexborough, a town in South Yorkshire, where he began attending school and was encouraged by his teachers to write poetry. Hughes was awarded a scholarship to Cambridge University in 1948, but he opted to serve in the Royal Air Force (RAF) before pursuing higher education. He served two years as a ground wireless mechanic at a remote RAF radio station, where, by his own admission, he spent most of his time reading Shakespeare. In 1951 Hughes began his studies in English literature at Cambridge’s Pembroke College, which he continued for two years before spending his third and final year at Cambridge engaged in the study of archaeology and anthropology. After leaving college, Hughes resided in London and Cambridge, where he held a variety of jobs, including stints as a rose gardener, schoolteacher, and zoo attendant. During this period, Hughes cultivated a number of friendships with literary figures of the time and published several poems in literary periodicals. In 1956 he met American poet Sylvia Plath, and after a courtship that lasted only four months, the two were married on June 16. Plath introduced Hughes to contemporary American poetry and encouraged him to submit his manuscript for The Hawk in the Rain to an American literary contest. Hughes’s manuscript was selected out of 287 entries by the judges, noted authors W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, and was published in both the United States and England in 1957.

From 1957 until 1959 Hughes and Plath lived in the United States, where they both became college instructors—Hughes at the University of Massachusetts and Plath at her alma mater, Smith College—before deciding against academic careers. The couple returned to England in December, 1959, and in April, 1960 their daughter Frieda was born in London. In January, 1962 the couple’s son Nicholas Farrar was born in a small mid-Devon village, where the couple resided in a cottage. Although reportedly the Hugheses’ marriage was rewarding in many ways, there were difficulties, and they ultimately separated and planned to divorce. Plath returned to live in London, where she committed suicide in February, 1963. Hughes was devastated, and wrote little poetry during the three years following Plath’s death. Hughes carefully edited and promoted his late wife’s poetry and journals, and is primarily responsible for the success of Plath’s posthumously published works. During the late 1960s, Hughes again began to write prolifically, and published several works of poetry and prose before the close of the decade. In March, 1969, Hughes’s companion, Assia Gutman, killed herself, taking her young daughter with her; Hughes’s sorrow over this loss and the earlier loss of Plath is reflected in his works. Hughes married his second wife, Carol Orchard, in 1970 and took up residence on a farm in Devon, where he began raising sheep and cattle. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hughes continued to publish poetry, prose, drama, literary criticism, and works for children, as well as editing the works of Plath and other writers. Hughes’s works have garnered numerous awards throughout his career; he received the Guinness Poetry Awards first prize in 1958, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959, the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960, the Premio Internazionale Taormina in 1973, and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1974. In addition to these awards, Hughes had conferred upon him the Order of the British Empire in 1977, and in 1984 he was named Great Britain’s Poet Laureate.

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Poem Summary

Lines 1-4

“The wood” in line 1 refers to a forest, as in the American expression “the woods.” Seated in a treetop, the hawk is able to look down on the world like a king. Hughes establishes the hawk’s personality in the first line, though, by describing it as having its eyes closed: the hawk is impressed with neither the vastness of the world nor with itself for being above the world. This hawk has no “falsifying dreams” about anything being better or worse than it really is. In line 3, the imagery, or physical symbol of the bird being “hooked” at top and bottom not only reminds the reader of the physical appearance of the bird, but also emphasizes the sharp parts of the bird that are used for attacking and killing. In addition, the use of “feet” instead of “claws” creates a link in the reader’s mind between the hawk’s life and human existence; this sort of connection is called personification.

The hawk’s claim in line 2 that it has no falsifying dreams is contradicted by its statement in line 4 that it rehearses “perfect” kills in his sleep. Critics have pointed out that, although this hawk is supposed to be an impersonal killing machine, it has too much self-consciousness for us to consider it to be motivated by instinct alone. The hawk has an opinion about what would be perfection in killing, which shows that it is not outside of the sphere of morality, despite its claim to the contrary.

Lines 5-8

In its tone, this stanza displays a sense of self-importance that matches the hawk’s physical position above the world. The words “convenience,” “buoyancy,” “advantage,” and “inspection” are all examples of elevated, sophisticated diction. Spoken by the hawk, these words indicate that it is a very intelligent bird. This use of language implies that the hawk is mentally as well as physically superior. In line 8, the hawk uses the word “face” to give human qualities to the earth, and it says not only that it can see the earth’s face but that it is there “for my inspection,” as if the earth awaits the hawk’s inspection.

Lines 9-12

“Creation,” because it is capitalized, refers not just to all that exists, but to God, since references to God or pronouns that stand for God are usually capitalized. The understanding of God here is less specific than the images usually accepted by major religions. In the third stanza, there are three mentions of the hawk’s feet. The first is a somewhat simple one, linking the hawk to its natural habitat, which is portrayed as a difficult one through the use of the word “rough.” In the second mention, the hawk asserts that it is not just part of the world, but the end of, the reason for all that exists. In line 12, the hawk takes this self-important view even further, implying that since it exists as the summation of all that is, it is superior even to God. According to such reasoning, God and other beings are not recognized as having any more will or desire than the tree’s bark has. The hawk sees others as creatures performing their specific functions, just as it performs its function when it kills. Presumably, in this worldview, the hawk’s victims understand that it has no purpose but to kill them.

Lines 13-16

“Sophistry” is reasoning that is clever and seems to be well-founded, but in actuality is hollow and false. When the hawk says in line 15, “There is no sophistry in my body,” it is indicating that the body does not reason badly because it does not reason at all; it acts. In this way, the poem

Media Adaptations

Ted Hughes, who has a strong and rhythmic reading voice, is a pleasure to listen to. He has recorded many of his poems on audio cassette, including the recently released The Thought Fox & Other Poems, available from Faber & Faber.

seems to express the idea that any amount of reasoning will have some falseness to it and that the only way to avoid falseness is to avoid reasoning. The author has responded to criticisms that “Hawk Roosting” seems to approve of cruelty by saying that he only wanted the hawk to show what “Nature is thinking.” If nature’s thoughts are direct and without reason (such as “I see the mouse, I kill the mouse”), then this poem could be seen as a record of responses to physical stimuli. However, the hawk has ideas about the ways of the world (“I kill where I please because it is all mine”) that seem to come from the exact sort of sophistry that the hawk denies. Similarly, line 16 uses language that is intentionally harsh (“tearing off their heads,” rather than a more impartially descriptive phrase like “removing heads,” which would match the diction of stanza 2). The hawk appears quite conscious of the fact that its actions are vicious, and almost seems to enjoy it.

Lines 17-20

Each stanza of this poem begins with a direct, declarative statement that is brought to a stop at the end of the first line with punctuation. Lines such as these are called “end-stopped lines.” An end-stopped line that brings the flow of the poem to a halt just as the stanza is beginning gives the speaker’s tone a cold sharpness, as if the speaker is stating conditions and making demands rather than having a conversation with the reader. In line 17 this technique is used to make the hawk’s position on killing seem absolute and undisputable. As with the earlier reference to “the whole of Creation” (line 10), this stanza makes absolute statements such as “the one path,” “direct,” “through” (as opposed to “into”), and “No arguments” to convey the hawk’s unhesitating certainty.

In line 20 the hawk says that the rights it is entitled to are not the product of any arguments, implying that it has undeniable rights and that these rights are more important than anything, including God. This echoes the claim made in lines 18 and 19. Both lines emphasize a division between rationality and nature (referred to here as Creation), implying that man, as a rational creature, is separate and distinct from the natural world and from God.

Lines 21-24

In lines 1, 5, 9, and 21 this poem intermittently establishes a setting for the hawk who is speaking. The image in line 21 is especially notable because it does not emphasize the hawk’s viewpoint but specifically tells us about something, the sun, that is out of the range of the hawk’s vision. For the reader who is imagining a hawk on a tree branch, this detail helps to paint a picture, but given the hawk’s self-centered attitude throughout the poem, that it would mention something it does not see is unusual. To some extent, the perspective in this stanza is not just the hawk’s, but an objective point of view that is spoken through the hawk’s “I.” This is seen in the difference between lines 22 and 23: line 22 is an impartial statement, and line 23 expresses the same basic idea, but through the hawk’s all-encompassing ego. In making these two statements, one a passive observation and the other an aggressive claim, this poem draws attention to the different degrees of animal mentality that it offers. The final line is pure arrogance, extending the hawk’s previous claims about being the center of all that came before and all that currently exists to include all that will come to be.

Themes

Death

The hawk is a cunning and silent death from above, a bird of prey often portrayed as the noble killer who perches on top of the food chain. The poem begins with the regal image of the hawk sitting “on top of the wood … and the earth’s face upward for my inspection.” The theme of death in “Hawk Roosting” may be closely tied to its images of creation, as many religions also believe our lives on this earth are temporary. The hawk’s speaking tone, with its elevated diction bordering on arrogance, combined with the bird’s physical position overlooking the whole of its world, seem to place it firmly in control of life or death. Even the “Creation” which produced its claws and “each feather” now becomes its prey, gripped firmly in its talons.

While the subject of death is often weighted with grief and remorse, the hawk is emotionless in its discussion, referring to it as an “allotment,” as if it were to be rationed out. There is no room for remorse in that small skull, since the bird’s path toward survival “is direct / through the bones of the living.”

Violence and Cruelty

Students first encountering Ted Hughes’s work in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry are greeted with the following introduction: “Ted Hughes works within a subject-matter of violence, and his acknowledged talent in this area has evoked uneasy admiration.” While “Hawk Roosting” does portray images of violence, as in the line “My manners are tearing off heads,” this theme is balanced by a sort of nonchalant tone that diffuses the cruelty normally associated such a harsh act.

Some critics have called the hawk’s ability to kill without remorse and speak of her killing with such casual ease proof the bird is symbolically a fascist, citing lines like “I kill where I please because it is all mine.” Ted Hughes denies this, instead saying he intended the bird to represent “Nature thinking. Simply Nature.” Hughes may have put himself (and the hawk) in the line of criticism by crafting the voice of the poem in first person. By making the bird the narrator, the reader feels as though he or she is listening to another person talking, and judges what is said accordingly.

Perhaps a central theme of “Hawk Roosting” is that violence and cruelty are really a matter of perspective: while to humans any harmful act upon another person is cruel, in nature there are laws of survival which can not or should not be judged in human terms.

Natural Law

When Hughes himself defended the hawk against accusations of cruelty and of even being a fascist, he said he rather intended the bird to represent “Simply Nature.” Perhaps this means the poem’s theme shows that while a human act of violence against another human can be judged as wrong, nature has its own set of laws. Hughes has said that we are too “corrupted” by Christian morality and judgment to be able to see nature. The hawk

Topics for Further Study

Write a poem from the point of view of an animal that might be the hawk’s prey. Would the prey have the same perspective on “Natural Law” as the hawk? Would it use the same sort of language? Compare poems and discuss your answers.
Compare Hughes’s portrayal of a hawk with Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Hurt Hawks,” included in the 3rd volume of Poetry for Students. In your opinion, in what ways do both authors use the bird of prey to comment on our relationship with nature and other humans? Do you feel one poet’s portrayal is more accurate than the other? How so?
How does the fact that the hawk is aware of itself, referring to itself in first person, influence how you feel about what it says? Would you be more or less likely to accept its claims if the poem were written in the third person? Discuss your answers.

doesn’t kill out of anger, evil or greed, but out of pure survival, a need for “perfect kills and eat.” The sense that the bird’s actions follow a “Law” which should not be questioned are reinforced by lines that repeatedly refer to “legal” phrases, such as “my inspection,” “sophistry” and “No arguments assert my right.” Instead the hawk follows a natural law that has been in place for so long it will remain long after humans have left the earth. As the poem begins with “inaction,” so it ends “nothing has changed since I began. / My eye has permitted no change. / I am going to keep things like this.”

Style

This poem has no strict pattern to its rhythm or its rhyme scheme, thus it is considered an open form poem. However, the poem does make use of structural devices and repetition in other ways to make its point.

The most obvious structural pattern in “Hawk Roosting” is that there are four lines to each stanza, or cluster of lines. The lengths of the lines within each stanza are different, so the number of words in each stanza varies. Nevertheless, there is a visual consistency as the eye skims down the page. This degree of order corresponds to the poem’s subject matter by giving the piece an overall design, just as the speaker of the poem implies in stanza 3 that Creation has an overall design. A poem with a more rigid structure—for example, uniform rhythm in each line, or a regular rhyme scheme—would contradict the hawk’s sense of being accountable to no one.

There are rhymes at the ends of the third and fourth lines in the first stanza and again in the first and third lines in the second. The fact that these are in the beginning of the poem, and that the poem never rhymes again, may indicate that the author intended his readers to think at first that this poem was more traditional in sentiment and structure than it really is in order to make the hawk’s coldness more shocking. Throughout the poem there are internal rhymes, or rhyming words placed near each other but not at the ends of lines, such as “flight” and “right” in stanza 5. Many of these rhymes use assonance, in which the vowel sounds of the two words are alike, even though the end sounds of the words are not. Some examples of these are “sleep” and “eat” in stanza 1; “ray” and “face” in stanza 2; “took” and “foot” in stanza 3; and “began” and “am” in stanza 6. Such repetition of sounds allows the author to give a musical quality to the poem without adopting a rigid structure.

Historical Context

At the time “Hawk Roosting” was published in 1960, Ted Hughes was a fairly young poet. At only thirty years old, he was barely four years into his troubled marriage with fellow poet Sylvia Plath, a marriage that would end only three years later in bitter arguments, separation, and Plath’s tragic suicide. Some critics point first to Hughes’s biography to explain the nature of his often violent or cruel subject matter. While his relationship with the clinically depressed Sylvia Plath may account for the emotional tragedy that infuses his work, Hughes often contended that the natural world sustains itself on a different set of terms. Natural law is not to be judged on a scale of violence, but survival. As a boy Hughes regularly caught and tended wild animals around his home in Yorkshire, England. Perhaps this is why he “thinks of poems as a sort of animal [that] have a vivid life of their own, outside mine.”

In order to get a better context of Hughes’s work in 1960, it is important to note the poetic modes of the 1950s. With the publication of his first book, The Hawk in the Rain, in 1957, his work illustrated a strong move away from the popular poetic styles of the time. The stereotypical poem of the day was mostly domestic, mildly ironic, polite and understated. In contrast, Hughes hit the scene with almost Shakespearean language to explore themes that were more elemental and mythical. His bold and unflinching look at the natural world turned many heads, and younger poets began to follow his new path. Since then many poets have followed his lead into less self-conscious styles. Critics point out that from his earliest work to present, he has virtually ignored the social structures known as “manners,” choosing instead to take on the root of man’s relationship with man and the other living creatures which inhabit this planet.

In the years immediately preceding the publication of his second book, Lupercal, Ted Hughes and his wife lived in the United States. They both taught at universities for a short while, but quickly choose to dedicate their time to living frugally and writing. It was a period of great prosperity, hope, energy and power in the United States, and it was still possible to live nominally on meager earnings in order to pursue artistic careers. Both poets finished books during that time, Hughes his second, and Plath her first, The Colossus.

In December, 1959, they returned to England, where they planned to settle permanently, moving into a small village. Their daughter Frieda was born in 1960. Unfortunately the happy times did not last for long. Within a few years and the birth of a second child, Nicholas, the two complex and talented personalities began to clash. Hughes began falling in love with another woman, and when Plath discovered the attachment, the marriage collapsed. They separated, and in February, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London. Hughes, overcome by guilt, would not publish another book after Lupercal until 1957, dedicating his time wholly to editing and bringing Plath’s work to posthumous publication.

Compare & Contrast

1960: America’s relationship with Cuba quickly deteriorates after Fidel Castro signs an agreement at Havana on February 13th with Soviet first deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan. The paper strongly ties the neighboring island to Communist Russia both politically and militarily. Tensions caused by both American and Russian threats of nuclear action over the tiny country later come to a head in a naval standoff known as “The Cuban Missile Crisis.”
1998: Although Cuba is one of only a very small handful of Communist countries remaining, the relationship between Castro, still in power, and the American government, continues to get stronger. Castro shows a sign of goodwill by allowing the visit of Pope John Paul II, and American business investors pressure Washington to ease sanctions on Cuba so they may invest in the market there.
1960: The first commercial lasers are introduced by Hughes Laboratory in Malibu, California. The laser, an acronymn that stands for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” provides thousands of watts of energy in a single, consistent beam of light. They will be used for industrial metalwork cutting and welding.
1998: Lasers are widely used in a variety of diverse applications, from corrective eye and dental surgery to military targeting and “smart bombs.” Scientists and science-fiction writers alike imagine lasers as being the eventual first line of defense against any stray asteroids heading toward Earth.
1960: Domino’s Pizza opens in Detroit. Local entrepreneur Thomas Monaghan, 23, borrows $500 to buy his first pizza parlor.
1998: Having grown to become a multi-million dollar business with thousands of franchises nationwide, Domino’s has pioneered pizza delivery as we know it with “30 minutes or less” door-to-door service guarantees and its distinctive blue, red and white logos.

Critical Overview

“Hawk Roosting” received its greatest amount of critical attention after it was republished in Hughes’s Selected Poems: 1957-1967. By then, the poem was more than thirteen years old, and critics could study it as part of the overall pattern of Hughes’s work. Critics are sharply divided over the effectiveness of “Hawk Roosting.” Peter Meinke wrote a generally favorable review of Hughes’s work in The New Republic: “[A]s a description of his own inner landscape, which we all touch on somewhere, Hughes’ poems are completely compelling, but as a description of reality they suffer ‘tunnel vision’ …” Calvin Bedient wrote in The New York Times a month earlier (January 1974): “At his worst, [Hughes’s] poems say ‘TAKE THAT!’ He seems to boast that he can swallow more gore and nothingness than anyone else on the block …” But criticisms such as these blame the author for narrowness and bleakness, which Hughes could easily defend as his intention. Worse yet is Marjorie Perloff’s charge that “‘Hawk Roosting’ … has no meaningful reference to any conceivable situation.” She explains this by pointing out a weak link in Hughes’s poetry, that “in Hughes’ poetic universe, the relation of the individual to the hostile, amoral violence that surrounds him remains obscure.” Even worse than accusations of meaninglessness, though, are the critics who see “Hawk Roosting” as being pro-fascist. Although Hughes denied this claim, critic Robert Stuart responded that, because of a “lack of any note of self-awareness,” there is hardly any way to understand the murderous hawk except as a fascist. The little written about the poem’s technical and verbal skill is generally favorable, but many commentators do not accept the poem’s neutral moral stance as being characteristic of good poetry.

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a writer and instructor at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. In the following essay, Hochman discusses Hughes’s portrayal of the hawk in “Hawk Roosting.”

Few poems match the unruffled violence, the omnipotence-at-rest of Ted Hughes’s “Hawk Roosting.” From his second collection of poems entitled Lupercal (1960), “Hawk Roosting” is just one of many poetic meditations on the violence of, or surrounding, animals.

The poem’s six quatrains (four-line stanzas) of free verse (poetry mostly devoid of rhyme and meter) are written from the point of view of a hawk. In “Hawk Roosting,” Hughes attempts the impossible: to think like a hawk. His close-eyed hawk rests at the top of a tree, meditatively contemplating perfect kills made possible by the perfection of her body, a kind of flying, killing machine devoid of feeling, morals, and rationalization. Some critics accuse Hughes’s project of thinking like a hawk to be doomed, from the outset, to failure, a failure issuing from just another example of human ignorance or arrogance, or both. Why this accusation? Because critics have claimed that neither Hughes nor anyone else should have the audacity to believe they can understand the thought patterns of a being of another species (let alone an individual of the same species). And conversely, Hughes should not have deluded himself that persons can ever stop being who they are to the point that they can successfully imagine another.

Should Hughes have attempted this poem from the view of a hawk, knowing that he would never really get it right? Should a project be undertaken if it can’t be fully realized? Maybe, if we are to apply this question to such projects as roads and bridges. But whether it pertains to the realms of sympathy, empathy, and identification in terms of other individuals might just be another story.

To attempt to answer this question about the value of a human being thinking like a hawk or a non-human animal, at least one of several preliminary questions had better be asked: Is the hawk just one instance of nature or a representative of nature? The same question might also be asked this way: Is this “just a hawk,” or is this nature, itself, speaking through a hawk? Or finally, another version of the same question: Does the hawk speak for itself or for all of nature? If Hughes, himself, is allowed to answer this question, it seems that one would have to conclude that in the poem, nature is speaking through the hawk: “That bird is accused of being a fascist … the symbol of some horrible genocidal dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk, Nature is thinking. Simply Nature.”

But putting aside until later the issue as to whether the hawk is a fascist, it might be argued that Hughes did not carefully weigh his words. But let him be taken at his word—one hawk as a representative of not only all hawks, but of nature. If readers were prone to assert that thinking like a hawk was already folly or arrogance, then what can be said of Hughes attempting to penetrate the very “mind of nature,” not far different from penetrating the “mind of God.” Is Hughes’s body of animal poems, then, an attempt to write a bible of nature, the book of a world without God, a world based upon violence, a nature “red in tooth and claw?” If so, Hughes is assuredly even more arrogant than his roosting hawk. The trouble here is that assuming Hughes is merely arrogant stifles a discussion of a poem which seems to warrant more than quick dismissal or scorn.

Let us not take Hughes at his word. At least not yet, since Hughes could have meant only that his hawk as “Nature thinking” was just one example of nature thinking, not what nature would say if it were speaking through a vegetarian animal, say deer or rabbits. If this is the case, then Hughes attempted something less grandiose than understanding the “mind of nature.” Keeping in perspective that Hughes is still subject to the criticism that it is hubristic folly to think/speak as a hawk, or any animal for that matter, the hawk rendered as merely one voice in nature makes nature only partially, not wholly, violent. Since nothing in “Hawk Roosting” mentions the hawk as a representative of all nature, and since nature is as full of predators as of prey, it seems wiser to come down on the side of the poem being about a hawk, a hawk that is no more than a representative of hawks in general, and with caution, of carnivorous predators in general.

Another question can now be asked: Is the hawk an evil fascist, and therefore, are hawks and predators therefore evil? Hughes has already said his hawk is not a fascist, a word synonymous with dictators like Hitler and Mussolini. Hughes has also said the following: “The laws of the Creation are the only literally rational things, and we don’t yet know what they are. The nearest we can come to rational thinking is to stand respectfully, hat in hand before this Creation exceedingly alert for a new word.” This statement contends nature is deserving of respect and awe. Is “Hawk Roosting,” then, an example of “respectful standing”? Here, as always, the last word should be the poem’s—and the poem is completely silent as to whether this hawk deserves our respect or disgust. There is no other creature in this poem that might judge the hawk. And the poet seems about as absent as he can be from a piece he himself penned. Without any obvious manifestations of judgment, how then are readers to judge?

But perhaps this is precisely the point—we are not to stand in judgment of this hawk, or of predators in general. We are, first and foremost, to accept the bird on her own terms, to acknowledge her perfection in eye and feather, beak and claw, her absolute efficiency in distributing her allotment of death, her utter lack of need to rationalize or philosophize her killings. And not only the hawk’s own perfection, but we must also acknowledge how other parts of nature collaborate with the hawk to enable her killing: the sun’s light, the air’s buoyancy, the height of the trees, and the earth turned up to her inspection. And not only do the forces and elements of nature enable her, but all of creation has made this hawk the way she is.

If all the above were not enough evidence that this hawk is neither evil nor a symbol of human evil, there is one last reason that Hughes’s hawk deserves admiration, not condemnation. The hawk’s nature and philosophy is inherent, bestowed at birth by the laws of creation. So the hawk’s reasoning is true and invulnerable to the muddled and confused mental processes that affect humans. One might go even further to say that all argument and reasoning apart from that of creation’s is false argument, or sophistry. If this is the point of “Hawk Roosting,” then not only is the hawk a superior creature, but human beings are inferior since they, by outer force or inner need, or both, use mouth and mind to argue the merits of their actions. Such a scenario casts humanity as fallen from a nature that has not fallen from God, a nature on a par with Godliness.

One last question must now be posed: In spite of a decision that the hawk is depicted as awesome, not awful, is “Hawk Roosting” still a display of arrogance? In other words, is it presumptuous to believe that one can understand and duplicate the mental state of a hawk, or, for that matter, any animal? Unfortunately there is no way to assert one

What Do I Read Next?

Another British poet contemporary to Hughes who also shares a strong American popularity is Thom Gunn. The two poets have poems anthologized in a collection edited by Alan Bold, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes.
For his similar, unflinching poetic voice and approach toward man’s relationship with nature, many critics mention Robinson Jeffers in studies of Hughes’s work. His has numerous editions of selected poems, and is also included in Volume 3 of Poetry for Students.
Ted Hughes spent much of his time editing and publishing the posthumous poems of Sylvia Plath, his wife who committed suicide in 1963. You can read her poem “The Mirror” in Volume 1 of Poetry for Students, or check out her most famous and widely reprinted volume, Ariel.
When Hughes took the position of Britain’s Poet Laureate in 1984, he was not the first choice. Philip Larkin, who turned down the high profile poetic spotlight and thus made way for Hughes, is widely published in England and America. His Collected Poems is available at bookstores, and his poem “Toads” is included in this volume.

way or another whether Hughes has been successful in his attempt to think and speak like another. Thus it is difficult to determine if the poem is arrogant.

If anything, it might be supposed that the enterprise of thinking like another is fraught with obstacles and risks. While the path of obstacle and risk is sometimes better avoided, sometimes it is better confronted. “Hawk Roosting” is likely the occasion for the need of fight, not flight. Rather than a gesture of arrogance—Hughes having the audacity to think he can speak like a hawk—might it not be more prudent to praise Hughes for having accomplished the opposite of arrogance, for having made an attempt to imagine what a hawk feels? Is this not instead the height of empathy, to walk inside another’s shoes?

If this seems at all agreeable, then another question will inevitably arise: Did Hughes depict a hawk successfully, or has he fallen into the trap of anthropomorphism, depicting an animal with human attributes? While this question should be difficult to answer confidently, it can easily be said that Hughes succeeded in doing something interesting and provocative; that is, he acknowledged the killing that is so much a part of a hawk’s life without depicting the hawk as evil. In this way, Hughes has undermined the reductionist connection between violence and evil, a connection probably unnecessary when examining the nature of hawks, and perhaps only slightly necessary when examining the culture of humans.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Sean Robisch

Sean Robisch teaches composition and literature at Purdue University and holds a Ph.D. in American Literature. His fiction has appeared in Hopewell Review and Puerto del Sol. In the following essay, Robisch discusses the importance of Nature in Hughes’s work.

In response to the accusation that his poem “Hawk Roosting” celebrated violence, Ted Hughes responded, “Actually, what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It’s not so simple maybe because Nature is no longer so simple.” In this quote we find the essence of both the poem and of Hughes’s philosophy behind many of his writings about animals and the nonhuman world. His thinking is much like Robinson Jeffers, whose “inhumanism” examined how other species, climatic conditions, and ecological systems seemed to challenge human beings’ ideas about being supreme over nature. But Hughes’s approach, particularly in “Hawk Roosting” and other poems like it, departs from Jeffers’s in a very important way. Hughes uses Nature, with the capital “N,” as an abstract and mythological figure to invest his observations with symbolic value, while Jeffers used observation and the nonhuman world to critique the way humans use myth. Hughes may be a little less cynical, but also a little more romantic and less realistic than Jeffers, because the creatures of his poems are designed to connect us less to what is not human than to what is ancient and human—to the world of myth.

In 1960, after moving from Great Britain to teach at the University of Massachusetts, Hughes wrote Lupercal, the book in which “Hawk Roosting” appears. He began the project in Boston and finished it while travelling throughout the United States with his wife, writer Sylvia Plath. Lupercal was only Hughes’s second volume of poetry, the first being The Hawk in the Rain, which had won several British prizes and brought him much attention. Hughes would go on to write a great many poems about birds, even an entire collection called Crow, probably his most celebrated work. He also wrote about wolves and other animals in his poetry and in children’s books, often focussing on predators and the nature of the hunting animal, especially as it connected with the mythic rituals of cultures from all over the planet. This is important to remember when reading “Hawk Roosting,” because it fits into a book that Hughes designed according to an ancient Roman ritual.

The ritual was called the “Lupercalia,” which loosely refers to the wolf, and it was carried out as a rebirth or Spring rite, both to bring fertility to the land and to keep the wolves away from the new lambs. This Roman ceremony inspired the structure of Lupercal, which runs according to the various rules and components of the Lupercalia and in which we find “Hawk Roosting.” The poem itself was inspired by a project that Hughes had started earlier and abandoned, a long poem about England that carried the river as a repeated image; Hughes would use this in a later work rather than retain it in “Hawk Roosting.” The poem is both part of what Hughes considered a kind of “buried life” in England, that of experiencing the natural world, and a similarly buried life of humanity, that of the ancient animal myths.

Although Hughes hoped to show “Nature thinking,” he also said that every poem “is both a violation of the facts it uses and a violation of what we feel about the facts.” This means—according to Hughes—that fact, while important to some kinds of observation and reportage on the natural world, are not what govern the poet. He immediately acts on this impulse to challenge fact as the gauge of Nature thinking by writing the poem in the hawk’s thoughts. Its “voice” is presented in the first person, as a soliloquy or monologue. We are to suspend disbelief and accept, for the moment, that this is truly the hawk thinking. From this perspective, we learn that the hawk is pure and true to itself (it dreams “no falsifying dream”). Therefore, the dream it does have just two lines later, in which during sleep it may “rehearse perfect kills and eat” must be accurate and honest. What the hawk thinks and what the poet tells us it thinks are, in other words, the facts. We may at any time during the poem remember that these are actually the poet’s words being placed in the hawk’s mind. So if we stop imagining and simply trusting that the hawk is thinking this poem, we are aware of the poet’s speculation, his guessing at the hawk’s mind, which is commonly called “anthropomorphism.” Anthropomorphism means giving human thought or action to a nonhuman animal. It differs from personification in that it involves giving human qualities (rather than simply “life”) to that which is not human. For instance, we might anthropomorphize God by imagining a man with a white beard living in the clouds. In this poem, the hawk imagines itself as a kind of god, and we are invited to imagine along with it.

If we come across a line that seems too unlike a hawk, we may have to look at the poem from another perspective in order to appreciate it. For instance, let’s say we come to the word “sophistry,” which means the use of rhetoric that is plausible but flawed and usually self-important or posturing. We might question how a hawk conceives of such a notion, and therefore change our perspective to looking at what the poet is doing with the hawk, rather than at the hawk itself. In such complicated moments, we begin to encounter one of the frictions created by anthropomorphism, and by the ancient influences of myth, which is the question, “When do the facts matter and when do they not?”

And that is perhaps what Hughes wants us to ask. We never learn, for instance, the hawk’s sex. We call animals “it” when we are in doubt, and the animal becomes a kind of object, though one invested in the natural world in a way that humans are not. For Hughes, that connection of the hawk to its world extends beyond anthropomorphism. Here he uses a technique called “theriomorphism,” which means the attribution of divinity to an animal. We get this term from the Latin (incidentally, the language of the Roman Lupercalia). “Therio” means the “great, good beast,” or the perfect and divine form of the animal. And thus we are returned to the ancient mythic traditions. For example, critic Keith Sagar shows us that a line from the book of Job (41:11), “Whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine,” is very much like the hawk’s line, “I kill where I please because it is all mine.” The hawk claims to “hold Creation,” and that “It took the whole of Creation / To produce my foot.” This

“We may see in ‘Hawk Roosting’ a kind of quest for consciousness—the poet speculating about the thoughts of a hawk in order to learn something about what humans think of Nature.”

divinity in the animal is what Hughes implies as Nature capitalized, and the hawk as its representative, that is capable of thinking such grandiose thoughts.

Hughes’s approach, therefore, tells us in “Hawk Roosting” that if the hawk is divine, and Nature is thinking, then Nature must be pretty cold and unforgiving. “My manners are tearing off heads,” says the hawk. It claims to fly “Through the bones of the living.” This view of the divine and natural as being hard and frightful is what prompted some critics to say that Hughes “celebrated violence.” His answers about Nature thinking and about the violation of facts are so complex partly because he is trying to juggle his interest in nature with his respect for and fear of its power. Therefore the poem is important to understand as mythic rather than “accurate,” and as violent though hardly celebratory. In fact, we are not necessarily seeing a hawk at all, but something like the mask of a hawk. By reading the poem, we are part of a ritual the poet is performing on the page, so that the hawk teaches us something about ourselves. When it sits with its back to the sun, declaring that “Nothing has changed since I began,” it speaks like the Egyptian god Horus, the hawk with the powerful, all-seeing eye. This reminds us about the power of myth in poetry and about the role that poetry has in forming our mythologies. In this way, Hughes is acting very much like the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century just as much as a poet of the 1960s.

As Leonard Scigaj has explained, during the time when Ted Hughes wrote “Hawk Roosting,” formalism and the New Criticism were still being practiced by many poets. Formalism meant that the poem’s meter, rhyme, and structure were important and had to be held together consistently and properly for the poem to “work.” New Criticism said that the text on the page was all that was important, and that from a close reading of the forms at work in a poem, a reader could understand all that was necessary about its meaning. Hughes’s first book conformed to these ideas about standard form, but Lupercal began to depart from them. Hughes found in his own work and in the work of his contemporaries that the inner life—the human spirit—could be articulated through poetry, and that history, ritual, and religious practice were powerful forces in poems. He often expressed this through animal figures, just as societies have done for thousands of years, and eventually his experimentation and subsequent success would earn him the title of Poet Laureate of England.

So we may see in “Hawk Roosting” a kind of quest for consciousness—the poet speculating about the thoughts of a hawk in order to learn something about what we humans think of Nature. We often think only of beauty in nature—the awe at viewing the Grand Canyon or of a great storm far away. Critic Craig Robinson reminds us “that awe includes horror.” The canyon may be dangerous, and the storm might soon approach. The will to live, the role of the predator, and the barriers that exist between humans and animals are all a part of life. Even as Hughes gives us an imaginary hawk thinking of itself as a god and asserting its “right,” that same hawk’s arrogant assumption that it will “keep things like this” will prove to be, in time, a violation of the facts. Perhaps then, if a hawk is incapable of thinking such thoughts, we could just as easily picture ourselves perched “in the top of the wood,” giving human qualities to hawks, and godlike qualities to humans.

Source: Sean Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.